Orangejack LLC

Perhaps you’ve heard about Social Media but haven’t signed up to participate on any of the sites yet thinking they are all for kids with too much time on their hands.  Well let me share with you one of the more useful websites you can start with for your entry into social media: LinkedIN.

LinkedIN is a professional network.  It’s like a networking event you attend but this is all online.  They state:

Our mission is to help you be more effective in your daily work and open doors to opportunities using the professional relationships you already have.

Just like how most social media sites work, you first go to the site homepage and create a free account.  You now have a page on their network.  Mine is linkedin.com/in/orangejack.

Now it’s time to fill in your profile.  In short, what you are creating in an online version of your resume or business/professional profile.  The goal at this point is to create a profile that shows who you are professionally and what sort of opportunities you are interested in.

Once you are all set up it’s time for the social networking part.  There are millions of others on LinkedIN who have their own profile also.  If you know them you can invite them to connect with you.  If they accept they you two are connected.  Think of it as exchanging business cards but with a lot more relevant information.  The advantage here is that now you can see who they are connected to (and who their connections are) in order to see if you should make more connections and ask for an introduction.

Expanding your connections allows you to be open for more opportunities to connect, find jobs, hire qualified people, and potential partners. Search the site to see if your friends are on there or invite others to connect.  The more you build your network the more opportunities you will find for professional networking.  If you’ve worked with someone in the past and liked their services, you can write a reccomendation that will show up on their profile.

I encourage you to create an account and play around.  Feel free to invite me to be one of your connections by requesting from my LinkedIN profile.  Let me know if you have any questions about LinkedIN.  There’s plenty of other things you can do on the site easily and some not so easily.  But it’s a great start into social media for professionals.